Posts with the tag 'morality'
Interesting discussion of the Holocaust and how much the average German was complicit in it over at First Things - here’s the bit I’d like to discuss:
The Holocaust may be the only universally agreed upon icon of absolute evil, but we deceive ourselves if we insist upon its utter singularity. Kershaw concludes on the sobering note: “So far, with great effort, the combination [that produced the Holocaust], which would be truly dangerous if marshaled by a powerful state entity, has been held in check. Will it continue to be?” Neither divine promise nor our knowledge of the human capacity for good and evil warrants a certain answer in the affirmative.
During the Third Reich, ordinary Germans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a chilling phrase. We might easily say, and many do all too easily say, that during the era of slavery or during current horrors such as the genocide in Sudan or the daily killing of thousands of unborn children in the abortuaries around the country, most ordinary Americans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a moralistic cheap shot. The truth is that we all have many more things on our minds, and necessarily so. Such as families, jobs, dealing with sickness, and warding off despair. Not to mention, for many, the distinctly unnecessary hours every day spent surfing and chatting on the blogosphere.
The Third Reich is rightly viewed as an icon of evil. This does not mean, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, that the ordinary Germans of the time are the icon of moral indifference or complicity in great evil. Then it was the Jews, the Slavs, and the gypsies. At other times, it is another class of human beings. Given the requisite mix of circumstances, which is not beyond imagination, it is an idle conceit to think that ordinary Americans would behave more nobly than did the Germans of Hitler’s day. Among any people of any time, moral courage is the exception and not the rule. There are heroes and heroines who contend against the great evils of their time, but even they must be selective. You may be devoting your life to helping the people of Sudan, but what are you doing to help prisoners of conscience in China, or to stop international sex trafficking, or to feed the hungry of Zimbabwe, or to relieve the loneliness of old people in the nursing home within an easy drive from your home? The list goes on and on.
“They had many more things on their minds.” And so do we all. Contemplating monstrous evils, such as the Third Reich, is not an occasion for preening in our supposed moral superiority but for humility, for self-examination, for renewed discernment of our duty, and for more earnest prayer for the coming of the promised Kingdom.
If you read Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp, you’ll find that average Germans slipped easily into the role of slave-master over the Slavs and Jews imported into Germany for drudge labor. While many acts of kindness were done by individual Germans for the captives, the plain fact of the matter is that most Germans didn’t act upon any sense of moral obligation towards their fellow human beings, and a very large number took extreme pleasure in their ability to dominate and harm. The question really boils down to this: do the people, on average, just follow along with their government, or does the government always tend to respond to the basic desires of the people? Did, that is, the Nazis convince the Germans to be evil (or at least turn a blind eye to it) or was the evil done by the Nazis latent in the German people from the start? My view is the latter - the evil was built in, and the Nazis just exploited it.
We all have it in us, you see? Only a routine adherence to first principles prevents any of us from slipping into varied forms of evil - and evil, of course, doesn’t require a death camp. Just to have a cold heart towards another human being is evil - and only by continuing to remind ourselves that the other person is due all the love and respect that we feel is our due prevents us from becoming cold hearted. For far too many people, this necessity of keeping on the proper track is forgotten, or left aside as inconvenient. It is much easier to separate one’s self from the evil than to stand up and be counted against it - faced with someone doing something horrible (like, say, gangsters terrorising a neighborhood) it is much easier to just close one’s eyes and walk past, pretending that it is someone else’s problem and, at any rate, why should I risk my neck for people I don’t know personally? In this attitude, of course, is the forgetfullness that if any one of us were terrorised by gangsters, we’d want the entire community to rise up as one to defend us.
There is also the second part of evil - that human desire to be on the winning side. When someone is despised, it is much easier to join those doing the despising than to join the despised. From large to small, it works the same - the Nazis despised the Jews and as the Nazis seemed to be the winners, many Germans simply wanted to be on the winning team; down at the smaller level, it could be merely joining in on some malicious gossip about someone disliked at the office. The actual effects are different, but the evil is the same.
In the end, the people are responsible for what is done in their name - there can be excuses for being under duress, but at the end of the day a government can only do what it convinces people to accept, at least in the sense of a tacit acceptance based upon silence. This does not argue in favor of the collective punishment of a nation if its leadership does wrong, but it does educate us on the need to be ever vigilant - an unguarded moment can be the ruin of a person, or of a nation. And so when someone does suggest even the slightest evil is ok because it is more convenient, that is the moment to stand firm against it - when the snake is just out of its shell, that is the easiest time to kill it…wait until it is full grown, and it becomes a much larger problem and a much larger threat.
Tags: Holocaust, morality, Nazi Germany
June 29th, 2008
There might be a lot in this:
Hip hop mogul 50 Cent, Universal Music Group and several of its record labels were sued on Wednesday for promoting a “gangsta lifestyle” by a 14-year-old boy who says friends of the rapper assaulted him.
The lawsuit filed by James Rosemond and his mother, Cynthia Reed, says Universal Music Group — owned by Vivendi SA — and its labels Interscope Records, G-Unit Records and Shady Records, bear responsibility for the assault because they encourage artists to pursue violent, criminal lifestyles.
The lawsuit also names 50 Cent — whose real name is Curtis Jackson — Violator Management, Violator CEO Chris Lighty, Tony Yayo, a rapper and a member of 50 Cent’s G-Unit hip hop group, and Lowell Fletcher, an employee of Yayo.
All defendants declined to comment.
I imagine that the plaintif here is seeking a payday, and some lawyers are licking their chops over a hefty out-of-court settlement - but it occurs to me that those who purvey socially destructive sex and violence in our popular culture do bear at least some responsibility for the resultant social pathologies. Should not a record company, for instance, which puts out music glorifying “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll” pay a price when some of their customers take them at their word and ruin themselves via a course of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll”?
I’ve often wished I could ask some of our pop culture icons - especially those in music - if they feel any shame or remorse that their glorification of sex, drugs and violence has led countless young people into a self-destructive lifestyle, un-supported by the vast monetary resources of rock stars and music moguls, who can pay for rehab and for others to clean up their messes? Now it occurs to me that we could, in effect, place a tax on popular culture - make it help pay for the problems it helps create.
How many of us have friends and family members who went whole hog into sex and drugs because it was “cool” - and made “cool” because various pop culture heros did it (or, at least, seemed to do it) and it never appeared to cause them any problems, and is presented to the public as a heck of a lot of fun? Counting quicky among my friends and family over the past 30 years, I come up with seven who destroyed their lives at the urging of popular culture, and one of them is actually dead. True, we all have to be held responsible for our own choices in life - and these friends and family members are paying their price…in poverty, addiction and, in one case, in a coffin. And as we all have to be held responsible for our choices, shouldn’t stars and media corporations pay their price for their choices? No one was ever clamouring for gansta-rap - the music business put it out, and slickly marketed it for maximum impact on young people. They created the market for it, and then raked in the huge profits…isn’t it high time they paid a bit back? Made good some of the damage they’ve done?
What do you think?
Tags: Legal affairs, morality, Popular Culture
April 10th, 2008
This is laying down the social conservative marker with gusto:
John, half our country today is ready to vote for a presidential candidate, be it a white woman or a black man, who favors promiscuous use of government power to pretend to solve every domestic challenge we have.
Both these candidates want to nationalize health care, raise taxes to deal with our Social Security and Medicare crises, and onerously regulate the mortgage industry. Both condemned the Supreme Court’s decision banning partial birth abortion. Both reject the only hope we have for addressing our education problems: school choice.
I appreciate your concern for how we are treating the 600 or so detainees we are holding in Guantanamo.
But have you thought about the 2.3 million of our own citizens — 1 percent of our adult population — in prison? Ten percent of black men between 20 and 34 are in prison or jail.
If millions of low-income Americans would hear a genuine and aggressive message from our leadership about how conservative and traditional values address their problems, they’d be less susceptible to destructive illusions peddled by those like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
While you spoke in Los Angeles, Social Security and Medicare trustees issued a report. These systems are bankrupt and in the red by more than $50 trillion — several times our gross domestic product. This is more than a cash flow problem; this is a misuse of government crisis. Is this not a “transcendent threat?”
Our incidence of out-of-wedlock births — almost 40 percent — is 10 times greater than 50 years ago. Do you see breakdown of the American family as a “transcendent threat?”
How can we light the path to freedom for others when we are so clearly losing the way ourselves? I think the “transcendent threat” is the dimming of that light from the city on the hill.
In a broad sense, Ms. Parker is correct - our primary problem today is a moral problem. All of the weapons in the world won’t protect us from terrorism if we don’t have the moral courage to fight the terrorists - but, also, all of the education initiatives in the world will avail us nothing if we don’t show the moral courage to insist upon results; all the welfare programs in the world won’t do anything if we don’t demand that poor people with children form families in order to receive benefits; all the programs to deter youth crime will be pure wheel-spinning if we don’t shut down the purveyors of violence and smut who propagandise the children into criminality. Our problems stem from the collapse of Judeo-Christian morality and only a re-assertion of such morality will save us from ultimate destruction as a nation. So, kudos to Ms. Parker for speaking truth out loud.
On the other hand…politics is the art of the possible and while we on the right know what needs to be done, we can’t just willy-nilly shove it through. Festina lente, goes the old Latin saw - make haste slowly. Try to do too much, too fast, and we might provoke a reaction against our whole program, thus setting ourselves back Lord only knows how much. Elect the most conservative men and women we can find; strongly pressure them to toe the conservative line - but, in the end, trust in God that the path will be cleared for those who serve Truth.
Given the whole situation we find ourselves in, electing John McCain is not just the best we can do in the negative sense, but will also be a substantial step forward for the conservative movement, as a whole. Behind John McCain’s strong leadership and appeal to the middle, we will be much better position to present the conservative agenda to the American people for their consideration and eventual approval.
Tags: John McCain, morality, Star Parker
April 2nd, 2008
What an amazingly topsy-turvy view:
Lindsay, Mar 19, 2008 (CNA).- The firing of a county library employee who disobeyed her supervisor in reporting to police a patron who was viewing child pornography has focused attention on permissive library “free speech” policies.
Brenda Biesterfeld, a librarian assistant in Lindsay, California, was ordered by her supervisor not to report a man who was looking at pictures of naked boys on the library’s public computer. She called police anyway. On the 39-year-old man’s next visit, police caught him allegedly viewing child pornography.
The man, Donny Lynn Chrisler, was arrested on March 4 on suspicion of violating child pornography and obscenity laws. Police say they found “kiddie porn” in Chrisler’s trailer home.
Biesterfeld said she had a hostile conversation with her supervisor, Judi Hill, after she ignored the supervisor’s orders and notified police. “She kind of threatened me,” Biesterfeld said. “She said I worked for the county, and when the county tells you to do something, you do what the county tells you. She said I had no loyalty to the county. I told her I was a mother and a citizen also, and not just a county employee.”
Biesterfeld was fired on March 6. A letter from Tulare County Librarian Brian Lewis said that probationary employees such as Biesterfeld can be terminated at any time if they don’t perform at a level “necessary for fully satisfactory performance in the employee’s position.”
However, a Lindsay city councilwoman said that six weeks before the firing, she was told that Biesterfeld was doing a great job.
On March 14, the Linsdsay City Council sent a letter to Tulare county supervisors complaining about Judi Hill’s “abrupt, demanding and demeaning” phone call to a police captain telling him to call off his pornography investigation because the city had “no business interfering” with library matters.
Do you want to know an indisputable and very obvious truth? The Minutemen who stood fast at Lexington and Concord; the boys in blue who won Gettysburg; the Doughboys who charged into the Argonne; the Marines who raised Old Glory on Iwo Jima…not a one of them fought for the right of creeps to view pornography. This is free speech:
Guy A: I think that taxes should be raised.
Guy B: I think tha taxes should be lowered.
Guy A: I say you’re a bloody fool for believing that.
Guy B: Well, so’s your old man.
Free speech is not and cannot ever be someone fondling himself while looking at dirty pictures - to say that it is a matter of free speech is to betray either an amazing ignorance of what freedom is, or an amazing cowardice afraid to stand up for what is right. But here we are - not only is this library (and many others around the nation; I’ve heard of this issue plenty of times - just not quite so starkly as this) allowing people to view pornography on public-owned computer (your tax dollars at work, boys and girls), but illegal pornography…and then getting mad when someone has the nerve to report a crime to the police.
We live in one utterly screwed up world, my friends - and the screwing up was uniformly and quite deliberately done by liberals…oh, sure; they didn’t mean it to come out this way, but any one with the sense God gave little, white mice could see where it would wind up…when you ease up on depravity all you get is more of it. Why? Because human beings are fallible - they will screw up, and the more you allow them to do so, the more they’ll do it. Life has rules not because someone arbitrarily is trying to stop fun from happening (though liberals are making a stab at that, too, with their asinine anti-smoking and anti-alchohol campaigns), but because people need rules to live in a civil society.
We’d better stop this pretty quick - the rot has gone far enough. A time when there is a dispute about whether a kiddie-porn consumer should be turned in to the police is a time when the final line has already been crossed, and if we don’t back up then things really will go to pieces.
Tags: morality, pornography, public libraries, public morality
March 20th, 2008
The priest of my parish once opined in my hearing that the war is a “stupid war”. It was in the nature of an offhand comment, but I think it touched upon a core belief of this good priest - that war is stupid, and thus this war is stupid, too. I cannot believe that this priest so filled with love of God and neighbor would think that the people who fight the war are stupid, or that those who agree with the war policy are stupid. Still, it cannot be ignore that throughout Catholic history, war has been held to be a regretable necessity at best, and an incredible evil at worst. What about the Crusades? A long-delayed counter-attack - most of the time, the Church from the get-go was working to limit war in one way or another - the first bit of arms control was the Church’s attempt to ban the use of crossbows, after all, as an un-Christian weapon. It also cannot be denied - or ignored - that both the late, great John Paul II and the current Pope Benedict XVI have not had kind things to say of our effort in Iraq.
Since the start of the Iraq campaign, when lefty commenters discover I am Catholic, it follows swiftly that they will quote John Paul II or Benedict the XVI and then ask how I, as a Catholic, can support something supposedly condemned by such high authority. Quite simple - because these fine Popes are, in my opinion, wrong and I am completely free to disagree with them on the matter of the war in general and the liberation of Iraq in particular. Here are some words from Father Neuhaus on the matter:
The statement (Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship - PDF) goes on to say: “We do not have specific competence in political, economic, and military strategies and do not assess particular tactics, but we can, as teachers, share a moral tradition to help inform policy choices. Our Catholic teaching on war and peace offers hard questions, not easy answers. Our nation must now focus more on the ethics of exit than on the ethics of intervention.”
Exactly. People may argue until the cows come home about the rightness or wrongness of what was done in 2003, but the question now is what is required for a “responsible transition,” recognizing that such a transition entails many considerations, including stability in the Middle East, the credibility of American power in world affairs, and the prospect of securing a government of law and basic decency for the Iraqi people.
In other words, not only does the Church not condemn the initial action of 2003, but it also does not command anything like the cut-and-run demands of the American political left. In fact, it would be morally wrong for America, at this point, to precipitously withdraw. We must focus on the exit, but the exit may take quite a long time and actually require a great deal more fighting before it can be completed. And focus on the exit we have - the whole program of American strategy in Iraq is to focus on the exit. But it is to be a responsible exit which improves the situation, not make it worse.
As the statement notes, the Church does not have the competance to rule on matters of political expediency or military strategy - it is, after, a group dedicated to the worship of God and bringing people to salvation; this long and difficult task means that the Church has little time to study the campaigns of Patton or the particulars of American internal politics. It is refreshing, by the way, to have an organization which will say where it is unable to judge. The Church judges matters of faith and morals. I cannot deny the Trinity and remain a Christian - a matter of faith. I cannot deny that extra-marital sex is disordered - a matter of morals. But in matters of politics, economics and war, it is up to me to act as my conscience - instructed by the Church on faith and morals - dictates. My Catholic-instructed conscience tells me that as hard as the task is, we must fight until victory is achieved - not just in Iraq, but in the entire War on Terrorism.
Tags: Catholicism, Christianity, morality
November 18th, 2007
